Proof Iran Is Not Just The Country You See On The News

There is more to these 80 million people than you think.

In recent months, the country of Iran has been a major feature of the American news cycle.

Images of Ayatollah Khomeini are everywhere in our coverage. Talks of a nation hell-bent on nuclear bombs and war in the Middle East are omnipresent. Radical religious leaders are quoted and every effort by President Barack Obama to find solutions through diplomacy are shot down with harsh skepticism.

But most of the time, one major storyline is left out: There are nearly 80 million people who live in Iran, many of whom aren't crazy about their leaders.

A recent Vox video did its best to shed some light on those people. While acknowledging that dangerous extremists do exist and hold power in Iran, one Vox reporter friended 15 Iranians on Facebook to see what their life was like and how he would be received.

He choose a group of people between the ages of 21 and 35, a group that is apparently far less anti-West than the generation that came before them.

What he found was that these Iranians were normal people: uploading pictures of their food or sharing cat videos, having pride in their country or taking selfies. It's a side not often shown of Iranians, and a side worth considering when thinking about foreign policy and our neighbors here on planet Earth.